This photo of Swiss actress Ursula Andress in an autumnal vineyard appeared on an issue Paris Match magazine published in September 1964. Fewer than two years removed from her role in Dr. No it's fair to say she was at this moment one the biggest stars in the world. For the most part, the roles she played didn't make splashes as big as that made by Dr. No, but there's little doubt she's one of the more fondly remembered stars of her era. We have an entire series of Dr. No images that are well worth a look, so if you're inclined just click here.

4 für Texas opened in West Germany today in 1968 after premiering in the U.S. the previous December as 4 for Texas. This was a high powered production, starring Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Anita Ekberg, Ursula Andress, Charles Bronson, and incredibly, The Three Stooges. The movie was terribly reviewed when released, but it isn't as bad as all that. Sinatra and Martin vie for a fortune in stolen cash, and later for ownership of a profitable Galveston riverboat casino, but join forces to deal with Bronson, the villain. Ekberg and Andress are mainly interested in getting married. Critics of the time might not have been dazzled, but today, with Andress the only main member of the cast still living, 4 for Texas emits a strong aura of Rat Pack nostalgia. The poster art is by Rolf Goetze, a prolific illustrator who produced something like eight-hundred promos between 1958 and 1972, of which this one is surely among the best. See another example of his work here.

We've seen many photos over the years of Sean Connery and Ursula Andress messing around on the Jamaican beach set of Dr. No in 1962. The shots are all fun, so we compiled some of them above, and collectively they paint a portrait of two actors really enjoying their work. We should all be so lucky.

If you've never seen one, this is what an AP wire photo looked like back in 1966. The text at the bottom gives newspaper editors the identity of the subject and some basic facts. No identity needed here—this is Ursula Andress, and the photo is the one widely used when newspapers reported that her husband John Derek was filing for divorce in Tijuana, Mexico. This made us smile because the basic idea here was to show that Derek was out of his mind. Perhaps, however he had already established a pattern of moving on to younger, equally beautiful women. He was first married to Pati Behrs, but divorced her when he met nineteen-year-old Andress. She was thirty when they divorced and he moved on to twenty-three-year-old Linda Evans. And Evans was thirty-two when Derek tossed her over for sixteen-year-old Mary Collins, who you know better as Bo Derek. Andress, Evans, and Collins could have been sisters, and in fact they looked quite a bit like John Derek too (see below). But in Bo he had found not just another doppleganger, but an ingénue willing to star in the poorly made sexually oriented films he liked to direct. These included Fantasies (when Bo was sixteen), the almost competent Bolero, Ghosts Can't Do It, and Tarzan, the Ape Man. Bo and John John Derek stayed together until John died, a span of twenty-two years, so it seems wife number four cured him of his habit of trading for younger models. Just an interesting Hollywood factoid to enliven your Monday.

Duga was a publisher in the former Yugoslavia that reprinted many English language mysteries and thrillers into Serbian. The company’s name means Rainbow, and this novel from Donald Westlake was released in 1969 as a Zeleni Dodatak, or Green Edition, with Ursula Andress on the back. We have no idea why she’s there. We assume Duga put random hotties on the rear covers to entice buyers. The text there says “to your album,” which we like to think of as a mental album, like a spank bank, but that’s just us being rude. Obviously, the term refers to one’s collection of Green Edition back cover celebs. Collect them all and win a prize! That’s right! A weeklong trip to Zlatibor! Okay, now for what we don’t know. We don’t know which Westlake book this is. Desna Ruka translates from Serbian as “right hand,” but Eda Ganoleza translates as nothing—at least on the interfaces we used. A scan of the Westlake bibliography turns up no novel containing right hand in the title. So your guess is as good as ours. Doubtless people in Zlatibor know.

Tabloid tells curious readers everything they always wanted to know about things that are none of their business.

The last time we checked in on Top Secret was with their October 1962 issue. Today we’re visiting January 1964 and plenty has changed in the intervening months. Foremost—the paper and printing quality have degraded to what surely must have been the lowest standard available at the time, which is why our scans are grainy. But we can still recognize June Wilkinson on the cover, who we’re told is retiring from modeling, and inside readers hear from Ursula Andress, Jack Lemmon, Brigitte Bardot, Shirley MacLaine, Mandy Rice-Davies and more.

Editors also tout “one of the most earth-shaking advances in the exploration of outer space!” Wow. Was it warp drive? A transporter beam? A stargate? No. It was that America’s newest astronaut, Edward Dwight, Jr., was a different skin color than the other astronauts. We might deign to call that an advance in the attitudes of NASA during an age of state apartheid. Space travel, on the other hand, remained space travel, unchanged. Top Secret implies Dwight was the first black American qualified to be an astronaut, and by so doing avoids admitting that the door was simply closed before his arrival. You know this game—all backslapping, zero introspection. But we get it. “Our First Negro Astronaut!” is a bit more celebratory than, “We should have done this from the beginning.”

But we must move on, because the real gem in this issue comes later, in the story you see announced in the cover’s blazing red banner: Hidden Homos—How To Spot Them! Goodness, where to begin with this? First, we’ll say we would dearly love to reproduce this entire article as an artifact of an intellectual dark age, but it’s Saturday, and time is fleeting. Just know that the language is baroque in its viciousness. Thestory begins with the tale of a company president who unknowingly hired a gay man and had no idea until several years later when the hiree—now a manager—got drunk at a company party and began slapping and scratching another man. Soon four employees were involved in this spat. The company president exclaimed: “My God! Those men are all queers!”

Top Secret explains: “Once the camouflaged homosexual has gotten himself a snug berth, he starts easing others of his ilk into the office. Before long, most of the straight male employees are out on their ears and the camouflaged fags have taken over.” Editors then list the eight most common types of gay men against whom normal, red-blooded Americans must be vigilant (by refusing to hire for any sort of job, potentially harassing out of the neighborhood, and possibly reporting to the authorities). Ready? Here we go with a few highlights:

1: The Overly Fastidious Dresser—obsessive interest in clothes is a feminine trait, and in men it may well be a danger signal.

2: The Overly Hygenic Type—their faces are invariably too-closely shaven. They make a fetish of washing their hands.

3: The Uriah Heep Type—he seeks to prove how very humble and insignificant he is by heaping praise upon others.

4: The Maiden Aunt’s Delight—these men associate with older women because such women make no heterosexual erotic demands upon them.

5: The Solitary Drinker—although he is not gregarious or even friendly, his eyes are constantly roving, covertly peering at others in the bar, particularly other men, seeking a sign of recognition from another secret swish. When he sees one he will give a signal in return and soon both fruitcakes will depart to enjoy a “courtesy exchange.”

6: The Octopus—they put their hands on other men’s shoulders, dig them in the ribs, slap their thighs…

7: The Middle-Aged Mama’s Boy—such an obvious Oedipal situation may indicate homosexual tendencies or homosexuality in adult men of any age, married or single.

8: The Youth Lover—he is constantly engaged in youth work, organizing clubs, leading outings, playing the part of the jolly, ebullient uncle.

It would be interesting to do the opposite of everything on this list and see how long it takes our social, family and sex lives to fall apart. Just a thought. Anyway, Top Secret finishes the article with this bomb: “These are by no means the only types of secret swishes but they are the ones the average person is most likely to encounter.” So basically, the list is all well and good, but anyone can be gay. To which your average non-Neanderthal would reply, “Yes, anyone can be gay. And?” Well, and the editors of Top Secret suggest that anyone displaying suspicious behavior should be investigated more closely. Hmm… we wonder what depth and form those investigations should take? More scans below.

1967’s Casino Royale wasn’t a global Christmas movie in the sense that today’s films are, however it did premiere Christmas week in ten European countries, as well as today in Japan. The movie wasn’t good. Basic idea: Sean Connery is an imposter, so the real James Bond in the form of David Niven is coaxed out of retirement, and he comes up with a plan to confuse his arch enemies SMERSH by renaming all British agents—male and female—James Bond. Time’s review of Casino Royale was headlined “Keystone Cop Out,” and The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther was just as scathing, noting that “since it’s based more on slapstick than wit, with Bond cliché piled upon cliché, it tends to crumble and sprawl.”

But one thing about holiday blockbusters—past and present—is that they’re expensively promoted. The many posters produced to sell Casino Royale were top notch. A U.S. poster painted by the legendary Robert McGinnis remains one of his most iconic pieces, but we also like these Italian quattro foglio promos painted by the extensively and expensively collected Giorgio Olivetti. We saw a set of these asking $8,500 at an auction site. By contrast, below are several U.S. promos, not paintings but photo-illustrations, on which the film’s secondary players get starring roles. They aren’t nearly as collectible as the movie’s paintings, but they’re pretty, so we’re sharing them as well.

In some places the weather is warm every day, pretty much, but in others, warmth is a fleeting gift. Regardless of where you are, we are officially at the beginning of summer, with the solstice arriving today or tomorrow, depending on your time zone. So we’ve decided to pull together some summery promo pix. These are from Japanese magazines and feature stars who were most famous during the 1950s and 1960s, including Raquel Welch, Ursula Andress, Yvette Mimieux, and others. You can similar summer collections from previous years here and here.

This photo made today in 1954 shows American singer/actress Abbe Lane posing outside Ciro’s nightclub in West Hollywood, California. Lane had begun in show business as a child actress, but became world famous after she married bandleader Xavier Cugat and began fronting his group as a singer. Although this is a famous photo, one you can find elsewhere on the internet, we thought it was worth posting anyway, not just because of Lane, but because supper clubs like Ciro’s really don’t exist anymore. Ciro’s, which by the way was unrelated to the many famous Ciro’s that existed in Europe during the Jazz Age, from its opening in 1940 to its closing in 1957 was a favorite spot of screen personalities, singers, producers, and writers, a place where the night’s meet-ups and trysts were reported in the next day’s gossip columns. Below you see Lane and Cugat, Charlie Chaplin with Paulette Goddard, Lane onstage fronting Cugat’s rumba band, Cary Grant with Betsy Drake, Lucille Ball with Desi Arnaz, Jr., and others.

European publishers, like Italy’s Tecnografica, often used celebrities on their book covers. Here’s a favorite example—Swiss actress Ursula Andress on the cover of the illustrated giallo Invito alla violenza, by Hugh Pentecost, aka Judson Pentecost Phillips, aka Phillip Owen. The shot is from a 1965 photo series, another frame of which appeared in Spain’s Triunfo magazine. We don’t know whether the series was shot for Triunfo and rented by Tecnografica, or vice-versa. Possibly neither. It could have been shot as a promo series and sold to both Triunfo and Tecnografica. Alternatively, maybe Tecnografica simply appropriated the image. We only suggest that because we can’t think of any reason Ursula Andress would have needed to gnaw grass on the cover of a cheapie giallo three years after she appeared in Dr. No. Maybe we’ll find out the answer to that one later. In the meantime, we’re working on an aggregate post of celeb covers, which we’ll get up soon.

Update: Rafael wrote in with this: I suggest that these are promotional photos for 4 for Texas (USA 1963), freely appropriated by magazines everywhere.

And indeed he is right. Once we knew the movie we found many more promo shots of Andress wearing the same outfit. 4 for Texas also starred Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, as well as Anita Ekberg, which all sounds worthwhile to us. We will defnitely screen a copy of it. Thanks Rafael, for the help.

German-born theoretical physicist Albert Einstein publishes his general theory of relativity. Among the effects of the theory are phenomena such as the curvature of space-time, the bending of rays of light in gravitational fields, faster than light universe expansion, and the warping of space time around a rotating body.

1931—Nevada Approves Gambling

In the U.S., the state of Nevada passes a resolution allowing for legalized gambling. Unregulated gambling had been commonplace in the early Nevada mining towns, but was outlawed in 1909 as part of a nationwide anti-gaming crusade. The leading proponents of re-legalization expected that gambling would be a short term fix until the state's economic base widened to include less cyclical industries. However, gaming proved over time to be one of the least cyclical industries ever conceived.

1941—Tuskegee Airmen Take Flight

During World War II, the 99th Pursuit Squadron, aka the Tuskegee Airmen, is activated. The group is the first all-black unit of the Army Air Corp, and serves with distinction in Africa, Italy, Germany and other areas. In March 2007 the surviving airmen and the widows of those who had died received Congressional Gold Medals for their service.

1906—First Airplane Flight in Europe

Romanian designer Traian Vuia flies twelve meters outside Paris in a self-propelled airplane, taking off without the aid of tractors or cables, and thus becomes the first person to fly a self-propelled, heavier-than-air aircraft. Because his craft was not a glider, and did not need to be pulled, catapulted or otherwise assisted, it is considered by some historians to be the first true airplane.

1965—Leonov Walks in Space

Soviet cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov leaves his spacecraft the Voskhod 2 for twelve minutes. At the end of that time Leonov's spacesuit had inflated in the vacuum of space to the point where he could not re-enter Voskhod's airlock. He opened a valve to allow some of the suit's pressure to bleed off, was barely able to get back inside the capsule, and in so doing became the first person to complete a spacewalk.

It's easy. We have an uploader that makes it a snap. Use it to submit your art, text, header, and subhead. Your post can be funny, serious, or anything in between, as long as it's vintage pulp. You'll get a byline and experience the fleeting pride of free authorship. We'll edit your post for typos, but the rest is up to you. Click here to give us your best shot.